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Stratification of Chinese Higher Education

Qiang Zha is an assistant professor of education at York University in Toronto, and a co-author, most recently of, “Portraits of 21st Century Chinese Universities: In the Move to Mass Higher Education.”

Updated December 4, 2010, 12:53 AM

It is ironic that as China’s economy keeps growing, the degrees produced by its colleges seem to be rapidly losing their value. Investment in education and training are not paying off for many college graduates. Why? Does China not need knowledge workers?

The elite universities enjoy strong state patronage while the rest are largely left on their own.

In the past decade, Chinese higher education enrollment soared more than sevenfold, and the system now produces close to six million graduates a year. Shouldn’t these graduates be rewarded for their education credentials and qualifications and not be treated “as cheap as cabbages”?

The problem is due largely to a structural disorder in Chinese higher education.

With the quick expansion of higher education came stratification of the system. Chinese higher education has grown to be steeply hierarchical, with a small number of elite national universities (around 100 in total) sitting on top of the hierarchy and protected from overexpansion. Meanwhile, the majority (95 percent or so) of local universities and colleges have to accommodate most of the increased enrollment.

The elite universities enjoy strong state patronage in terms of higher concentration of public resources while the local ones are largely left to rely on market forces, which means that they have to take in more students in order to secure their revenue.

This widening gap inevitably led to deterioration of the quality of higher education in many colleges, especially the newly created ones but also the private ones, which suffer from a severe shortage of qualified and experienced teaching staff.

Worse still, many of these colleges favored adding “soft” programs, e.g., accounting, business/public administration, international commerce, foreign languages, etc. These popular programs require modest resources, thus providing an effective means for fast expansion. Graduates of these programs used to be welcomed into the job market. However, the proliferation of these programs has created a huge discrepancy between the supply and demand side.

With the market economy developing, divisions in China’s job market naturally emerged. The elite university graduates and those who studied “hard” programs, i.e., the sciences and technology, found better opportunities in the primary job market where there's great demand for their knowledge and skills.

The local college graduates and particularly those who studied “soft” programs are more likely to be pushed to the secondary job market, which is characterized by low wages and high levels of labor turnover.

However, as more opportunities become available in a maturing Chinese economy, those who have college degrees -- regardless of their field of discipline -- will benefit. In the long run, it is likely that the wages of most college graduates will improve.